Metal-Containing Proteins, Macrocycles, and Coordination Complexes in Therapeutic Applications and Disease

Call for Papers

Synthetic, kinetic, spectroscopic, photophysical, photochemical, and structural aspects of metal complexes and proteins with medical applications are discussed in this special issue.

The special edition will combine new research articles as well as articles based on presentations at ICCC 37 in Cape Town, South Africa, that are related to the above topics.

Treatment of diseases with natural and synthetic material has been going on since the dawn of man. In terms of metal-containing drugs, the platinum-containing drug cisplatin has long been the most effective metal-containing anticancer drug on the market.

However, all too frequently conventional drugs suffer from the inability to distinguish between healthy and cancer cells. Hence a concerted worldwide effort is in progress to discover and characterise new drugs (for this special addition metal-containing drugs or molecules are relevant) that may distinguish between healthy and cancer or other diseased cells. New techniques of drug delivery are sought and the use of natural products, proteins, antibodies, and synthetic polymers as drug delivery devices capable of targeting a diseased site is being investigated.

On the other hand, the propensity for certain macrocycles such as porphyrins, phthalocyanines, and related systems to exhibit some degree of selective absorption by cancer cells, coupled with their ability to photosensitize formation of singlet oxygen, is being exploited for alternative cancer treatments known as photodynamic therapy.

Many potentially good therapeutic agents do not reach clinics, since they are either bioincompatible or simply do not dissolve to a suitable extent in any body fluids. By making use of drug delivering devices, including water-soluble synthetic polymeric drug delivery systems, many pharmacological problems can be overcome, including that of solubility, specificity, and biocompatibility.

This special issue will address many if not all of the aspects mentioned in this call for papers and may help to stimulate new research in all areas of metal-containing drug research. It will also serve to combine in a focussed way publications on the newest basic and applied research that are currently conducted in international laboratories. The mere availability of such an issue will help to focus research efforts of new and experienced researchers on key problems in the field of metal-containing drug research.

It will also serve to help researchers in learning how basic tools of Chemistry such as NMR, X-ray crystallography, IR, kinetics, electrochemistry, photophysics, and photochemistry may be employed to study the structure, mechanism, and biological effects of novel metal-containing entities.

A selection of publications on in vivo and in vitro drug test results may also spawn new ideas for new research projects on mixed-metal drugs.

The focus of this issue will be the synthesis, characterisation, physical studies, and application of synthetic metal-containing complexes and natural occurring proteins in serious human diseases such as cancer, diabetes, arthritis, viral disease, and tuberculosis.

This issue will cover all aspects including syntheses, characterisation (such as structure, electrochemistry, kinetics, spectroscopy) and actual medical testing (in vivo and in vitro) of metal-containing compounds (coordination complexes, organometallics, metal-containing macrocycles, proteins, and polymers) intended for use in medicine with special focus on:

Authors should follow the Metal-Based Drugs manuscript format described at the journal site http://www.hindawi.com/journals/mbd/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the Metal-Based Drugs manuscript tracking system at http://mts.hindawi.com/, according to the following timetable:

Manuscript Due	August 1, 2007
First Round of Reviews	November 1, 2007
Publication Date	February 1, 2008

Guest Editors

• Jannie C. Swarts, Department of Chemistry, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein 9300, South Africa
• Michael J. Cook, School of Chemical Sciences and Pharmacy, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK
• Edward N Baker, Centre for Molecular Biodiscovery and School of Biological Sciences, The University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand